5.24.2011

Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games' L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game's developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.

5.23.2011

New questions about copyright have arisen in relation to the new movie, The Hangover Part II. Tattoo artist, S. Victor Whitmill, claims that Warner Brothers has infringed upon his rights by featuring the tattoo he designed for Mike Tyson on a character in the movie. Here's a clip from the New York Times article about the case:

“Mr. Whitmill has never been asked for permission for, and has never consented to, the use, reproduction or creation of a derivative work based on his original tattoo,” argues the lawsuit, which was filed April 28, and will be taken up next week.

The suit isn’t frivolous, however, legal experts say. They contend the case could offer the first rulings on tricky questions about how far the rights of the copyright holder extend in creations that are, after all, on someone else’s body. They are questions likely to crop up more often as it becomes more common for actors or athletes to have tattoos and as tattoo designs become more sophisticated.

5.17.2011

On May 14, 2011, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the Morganza Spillway in an attempt to ease flooding along the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The decision was made to protect the heavily populated areas and infrastructure around the ports of Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The decision is not without cost, however, to the thousands of people who are likely to lose homes and farms within the flood plain downstream.

On May 15, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image (top) of the Morganza Floodway. The image was acquired at 11:20 a.m. Central Daylight Time, one day after the spillway was partially opened. The lower photo was taken on May 14 by the Army Corps, several hours after water began streaming onto the floodway.

5.16.2011

Yale University has developed an open access policy for digitized images from its museums, archives and libraries, and launched the Discover Yale Digital Commons, which currently has over 250,000 images.

An excerpt from the announcement:

"The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration."

Time for Mac users to join the Great Unwashed? The attacks mightn't seem especially sophisticated to a wizened Windows user, but for Mac people this could be a foreboding sign of the inevitable. This is the downside of Apple's gaining a larger market share in the personal computer market.

"We Mac users are a pretty insufferably smug lot. How we look down our noses at mere PCs, how it offends our sensibilities to have to run Parallels and have Windows running on our beloved Macs. How we sneer at all the silly virus protection software because our Macs don’t get viruses.

Well my fellow Mac lovers, sneer no more, and perhaps the time is right to at least think about virus protection.

ZDnet reports on two in-the-wild attacks launched against Macs. Admittedly two isn’t a huge number, but these are in-the-wild attacks. The attacks, such as they are, are the fake AV scan (your computer is infected, buy this software to clean it up)."

Rays of sunlight? A second toe longer than your big toe? The dirt paths we see all across campus that connect two stretches of concrete walkway? Yes, they all have names, and this repost from BuzzFeed lists 25 of those everyday things and their names, with illustrations.